


idyll

by TomBowline



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Anal Sex, Dream Sex, Frottage, Gender, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Porn with Feelings, Such as they are, Touch-Starved, Unsettlingly Romantic, irving picks the wrong guy to fixate his repressed longing for gay intimacy on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 14:22:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29577447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline
Summary: John is on a hillside. He’s on a hillside in the brilliant soaking sun, looking out on a haze of blue horizon that he knows will at some point become the sea. He’s on a hillside that holds him firm like the most careful cradle, and Mr Hickey is beside him.This is always the worst sort of dream.
Relationships: Cornelius Hickey/John Irving
Comments: 1
Kudos: 31





	idyll

John is on a hillside. He’s on a hillside in the brilliant soaking sun, looking out on a haze of blue horizon that he knows will at some point become the sea. He’s on a hillside that holds him firm like the most careful cradle, and Mr Hickey is beside him. 

The slight form of him is huge in John’s vision, sprawled golden and lush and obviously at ease in the tall green grass. His hair comes down loose and long over his shoulders; it is, as ever, Judas-red, and in the sun it glows like new honey. He smiles at John, full of affection and free from guile, as he reaches out to slip a hand under John’s braces and trace the line of his breast - his heart within, beating slow and steady - from over his wash-thinned shirt. 

This is always the worst sort of dream. 

Of course, it would be preferable to dream not at all of this man and what he might do, but John has given that up for impossible. Now his only recourse is to prefer the more baldly wicked visions - Mr Hickey in the dingy boarding-house where John had once stayed a sleepless night, lying poised and pale like a cat on the creaking bed, holding a smart little flogger in his hand; Mr Hickey kneeling on the dim postage-stamp floor of John’s cabin, eyes wide and beseeching, begging John that he’d do anything to keep his crimes from the captain’s ear; Mr Hickey as the new farmhand in Australia, leaning against a fence with his hips canted out and his work all undone and a wicked little insinuation on his tongue that John must want him for something else, to keep him on so long. These scenes are easier to reject, easier to brush away as the work of the devil and the long cold night. But this sweetness, this baring his throat for the teeth of a stranger and receiving only blunt and loving nips in return, this _wanting_ and this _getting_ that feels more like being given - it is unsettling, and it feels like a betrayal of his faith more than anything else. Like a serpent in his throat, coiling down out of his own mind to burst forth into ruin.

“Dear heart,” Hickey murmurs to him from back in the watercolor wash of sensation that John supposes is, for the time being, reality. The smell of grass perfumes the air where their bodies lie disruptive and presumptuous upon the knoll. Large and hot and human, they are, and moving so carelessly through the world. 

The sun blazes, so they move under the shade of a tree; here, Hickey leans John against the trunk like a doll in his small hands, settles into his lap and strokes his collar open with terribly sweet familiarity. His hair falls like a curtain, soft and fragrant - no tarry whiff, no sawdust in his scalp, but something verdant and fresh like the grass they crush beneath themselves. The fact of its being long is indecent; the fact of its falling loose and unbound like this evokes a sort of soft bedroom intimacy which is infinitely more so. In a more savage encounter, John might wind it into his hand like the reins of a horse, to yank Hickey where he would as Hickey laughed and clawed him in return. But as they are he feels the need urgently to do nothing but stroke lightly at its clean softness and let it dance over his skin. 

The ends of it brush John’s neck, feather-twitchy, announcing the consuming kiss as it comes to eclipse John’s senses. Hickey’s nose is cold, despite the warm day; perhaps it is because John cannot imagine it else. Anyway his lips are warm enough where they lap and suck as if John’s mouth were an oyster from whence to pry a pearl - not that John is keeping his mouth shut; he will drown now, awash in a tide of spit and soft whiskers, and regret it in the morning. 

It is hard to regret anything when he feels so enveloped by love - pure and holy, it feels, each time Hickey’s skin touches his. Even when his slender dancing hand pulls John’s braces down and his shirt up and off; even when Hickey’s shirt follows and bares the soft-muscled, freckled expanse of his chest; even when their trousers slide down into the grass to be forgotten, John cannot feel that he is doing wrong. This is how Adam must have lain with Eve, in the very garden of creation: soft fingertips on his flanks, lithe and fine-furred thighs against his own fleshy ones, a shoulder burning hot and bony into the dip of his chest. Humans, in their essentials, are much the same, John thinks - a woman has hair on her body like a man, smells strange and sweats like a man. A man is not permitted to grow his hair long like a woman, but it does not at any point stop growing by nature. 

When Hickey unravels his underthings and flays him skin-bare to the gentle breeze, it is a torment and a relief. A torment, for John knows now that he must be doing wrong; a relief, for this part he can lay at the feet of the lust which he already knows sits soft and sweet and rotten in the core of him. Hickey takes him in hand and the erotic pleasure is secondary; the intimacy is what binds him, what tears at him, what sticks in his nostrils like the smell of green things. Hickey’s prick against his own, sack brushing sack, shafts sliding like silk - it is the togetherness, the fluid dripping from his tip and onto Hickey’s hand, that seals his fate. 

Looking up and into Hickey’s face is discomfiting; he is so close now, sharing breath, staring at John all bright and curious in a way that ought to be othering and ends up endearing. His eyes dance with light, and his nose juts long and impudent and still cold into the tip of John’s own. Looking down is worse, for he will see their pricks enclosed like a matched set, unhooded and vulnerable against each other, blindly seeking pleasure. Not just pleasure, John realizes, but a confirmation of affection, which is where the rot begins. There is love in the way Hickey pumps at the undersides of their heads, rolls his own hips to increase the essential friction, fondles his free hand down to press over the soft hot skin and the softer hotter furl below John’s prick. There is love in this knowledge of each other, rolling off them both like a sour perfume, and it ought to be the most frightening thing in this world that is not the world. Instead it is perfectly, sublimely natural. 

In a movement easy as if rehearsed he slips down the trunk of the tree to lie with his arse in Hickey’s lap, and Hickey seems to intuit what they are to do next - he thumbs John open and thrusts his cock in, smooth and simple like John is a woman, like his hole is slick with his own juices as a woman’s cunt would be. If John were a woman, he thinks deliriously, it would be alright; if John were a woman, though, Hickey might not want him. The thought is upsetting, apocalyptic, but quickly shunted away by the demanding slide of Hickey’s length within him. He watches his own thighs, hairy and pale, as they jolt and judder around Hickey’s middle; watches Hickey’s hands, cleaving tenderly to his hips; watches the place where they’re joined, stares through his own belly as if he can see where Hickey is stretching him open on his lovely and beloved prick. 

After awhile it’s all he can do to stare into Hickey’s face, eyes flickering downwards to be shaded by sandy lashes, teeth puckering his lip beneath the red mustache, brow knit in sweaty concentration. He beseeches with his gaze, and Hickey gives in - dips down, down, down like a lady in a painting with her hair streaming out over the water. Looking into her own reflection, one hand raised so daintily, and smiling with ruby lips. Hickey’s hands are both occupied, one on John’s prick and one on his flank to hold him up, and it is impossible to tell what he thinks as he looks down at John - but it does not matter, for his lips are just as red and just as sweet as they eat away gently at John’s own once more. Spit drips down John’s chin, his and Hickey’s both; human essentials, mingled irretrievably. Hickey bends his head to lap it up. 

He comes with Hickey’s hair stopping up his mouth and Hickey’s tongue laving at his neck. His issue spurts onto his own twitching belly, gumming up the trail of dark hair that marches down the slight swell of his middle, and when Hickey spends a moment later he pulls out with a sick squelch and aims his cock for the same spot. It feels ritual, unholy, debasing; more immediately, however, it feels good. He rubs it into his skin like a liniment, like something to be savored, and he feels it sing out the state of him, marked and seeded as if wed. 

When he wakes he can feel the ghostly touch of a thousand hot little hands and one soft twisting mouth, branded all-too-faint into his flesh. The sensation disappears presently, but his heart refuses with stubborn tenacity to forget the way it felt.


End file.
